Teaching as a work of heart. Why teaching teachers to care is important in ESD work in Jamaica

Abstract

This paper highlights the global and local barriers that make mainstreaming ESD into teacher education difficult. It suggests that in Jamaican there are ideological, practical, and structural impediments that stifle initiative and capacity for change work. Local research suggests teacher educators have awareness of ESD work but lack the competences needed to promote sustainability. They also lack a rationale powerful enough to make ESD personally and professionally meaningful to them. The paper makes a case for encouraging teacher educators to strengthen their ethic of caring in response to the serious issue of crime and violence in Jamaican schools. It posits this may be the impetus needed to encourage mainstreaming caring into teacher education. This would allow educators to experience how caring work can promote social and cultural change. Since the values that underpin caring work in teacher education are like those that underpin caring in sustainability work, it is possible teacher educators will be motivated to use their enhanced competences for caring in new ways. If caring is positioned as the core of teacher educators’ philosophy and practice, it can become a foundational ideology. This could strengthen possibilities for our teacher education institutions to develop institutional cultures that embrace ESD and are willing to mainstream sustainability.

Keywords:

• Mainstreaming ESD
• ideology of caring
• barriers to mainstreaming ESD

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Collaboration competency: the ability to learn from others; understand and respect the needs, perspectives and actions of others (empathy); understand, relate to and be sensitive to others (empathic leadership), deal with conflicts in a group; and facilitate collaborative and participatory problem-solving (Rieckmann 2018, 44–45).